The provincial government is aiming to make post-secondary education more accessible to students by expanding free online textbooks.
The B.C. Government has expanded the Open Textbook Project to include 50 new textbooks focused on skills training and technical subjects.
“We started off with the standardized first-year courses where the books are fairly static,” said Minister of Advanced Education Andrew Wilkinson. “We’ve now moved into the field textbooks in basic education for those who are adult learners for the first time and also trades because those are fields where the books can be very expensive.”
The online program now includes over 120 different textbooks for students and instructors to access free of charge.
“There will probably never be a situation where we are producing open textbooks for fourth year or graduate studies programs because they are very rarified areas that have to move quite quickly, but in terms of courses that are introductory or for first and second year programs, that’s wide open for us to do more and more of these textbooks,” Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson and Kamloops-North Thompson MLA Terry Lake were at Thompson Rivers University on Tuesday to engage with students who are using the online system.
The Kamloops-based university is a provincial leader in the Open Textbook Project with 29 different courses using the online textbooks.
“It’s not uncommon now for the cost of textbooks to be the cost of tuition. It’s a very serious expense and it’s one students don’t really budget for and don’t anticipate until they get a great big bill at the bookstore,” Wilkinson said.
B.C. was the first province in Canada to launch a government-sponsored online textbook platform, and the provincial government has invested more than $2 million to the project since 2012. It is estimated that more than 8,000 students in B.C. have saved more than $1 million by using online textbooks.
For more information about the project, visit the Open Textbook Project website.
